Your Right to Know

The troubled execution of convicted killer Dennis McGuire last week has prompted the American Civil Liberties Union and some state legislators to seek a moratorium on Ohio’s use of the death penalty.

But Dudley Sharp, a national pro-death-penalty expert, says a moratorium is unwarranted.

“The inmate was unconscious. He didn’t feel a thing,” Sharp said, basing his opinion on research he has conducted. “What’s the big deal here?”

Sharp, a victims’ advocate from Houston who makes regular appearances on national network news shows championing capital punishment, said both drugs used in McGuire’s execution on Thursday affect the respiratory system, and the results could have been expected.

“The ACLU is doing this because they oppose the death penalty, not because of what happened to this rapist-torturer-murderer,” Sharp said.

McGuire, 53, struggled, gasped for breath, made choking sounds and clenched his fists while apparently unconscious for about 10 minutes before being pronounced dead at 10:53 a.m. Thursday at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility near Lucasville.

There was no definite indication that the drug combination of midazolam, a sedative, and hydromorphone, a morphine derivative, triggered McGuire’s struggles. But, said Allen L. Bohnert, one of McGuire’s federal public defenders, the combination, never before used in the United States, produced a “failed, agonizing experiment by the state of Ohio.”

It was one of the longest of the 53 executions the state has conducted since resuming capital punishment in 1999.

McGuire was executed for the 1989 rape and murder of Joy Stewart, 22, of West Alexandria, in Preble County in western Ohio. Stewart was 30 weeks pregnant when McGuire raped, choked and stabbed her, then slit her throat.

Amber and Dennis McGuire, the children of the executed man, said on Friday that they plan to file a federal lawsuit against the state, arguing that their father’s rights under the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution were violated by his “cruel and unusual death.”

Dr. David Waisel, an anesthesiologist and professor at Harvard Medical School, essentially predicted what would happen to McGuire in testimony offered by McGuire’s defense team at a hearing before the execution. He said McGuire would be “awake and actively conscious for up to five minutes” and was at “substantial, objectively intolerable risk for experiencing the agony and horrifying sensation of being unable to breathe for a relevant time, as he slowly suffocates to death.”

Officials of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction and Gov. John Kasich have not commented.

The ACLU of Ohio wrote Kasich, urging him to “declare an immediate halt to executions in Ohio.”

“This is not about Dennis McGuire, his terrible crimes, or the crimes of others who await execution on Death Row,” the letter from ACLU Executive Director Christine Link and President Jack Guttenberg said. “It is about our duty as a society that sits in judgment of those who are convicted of crimes to treat them humanely and ensure their punishment does not violate the Constitution.”

Link and Guttenberg want Kasich to stop executions at least until an Ohio Supreme Court task force on administration of the death penalty reports in the next few months. The task force is not expected to call for ending the death penalty but will likely urge major changes in the process.

Ohio has five more executions scheduled this year, beginning with Gregory Lott on March 19.